


Tombs

by QueerGirlTakeover



Series: CreampuffWeek [2]
Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: CreampuffWeek
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-13
Updated: 2015-01-13
Packaged: 2018-03-07 09:52:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,103
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3170510
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QueerGirlTakeover/pseuds/QueerGirlTakeover
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Maybe someday Carmilla will go back to her birthplace. Maybe someday....</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tombs

She will walk those halls again, a ghost in the dark, in the light a living incarnation of the past. No, not living, that implies breath, a heart that beats, blood that leaves rather than enters. She will step through the door, imagine stepping into the past, see her father there on the stairs, welcoming guests to their ball. She will see her mother's coffin carried out, her brother's one third the size following behind. And years later, her father's, when he left her everything and a title. Black will cover her again.

She will look out her windows, sit on the bed where she slept, though the bedclothes and mattress are new. Hers have rotted. They will shout at her and she will bare her fangs. This is hers, they cannot have it.

She will dance in the ballroom, slick floor beneath her feet, retracing the steps she took when she was still a person. The echoes of music long since gone will reverberate from the walls. Their memory lives in the stone and time cannot erase it, not from her ears.

She will walk in her gardens again, she will stand under the tree she planted as a girl, see where its leaves have fallen. The flowers will not be the same, they will be imported, carefully cared for, and she will miss the wild ones that grew unbidden under the benches, when the gardeners' backs were turned. She will lay one hand on the earth and feel her little fingers blackened with it again, her dolls streaked with dirt. A bench sits where one used to, this one new and bright, built in a factory, and she will sit on it, remember the space as where she was first kissed, her lover's hands tight in her hair, looking furtively around to make sure they were never caught. Their protective bushes are gone now, long since dead and torn apart. She leaves that place. There was nothing for her left, anyway.

She will run her fingers over plastic placards and the surfaces of the glass coffins where remnants of her past are entombed for everyone to see. She will think that maybe they should put her in there with them, the body of the last Countess Karnstein, perfectly preserved. When they see the blood on her lips she thinks they will put her back in her stone tomb. Things like her are not meant to be seen.

In the parlor she will sit in her favorite chair. She will ignore them when they shout at her to leave. Her mother sat here and so will she, her father, her brother, her lover. She will run her fingers over the books on the walls, put her nose in close to smell them but any traces left of her past have been covered with newness and the feeling of signs saying _please do not touch._

She will stand in her father's study, look at his desk so big she used to think it was a boat, remember when she would hide underneath it from her nursemaid, doll clutched in pale fingers. She will read the informative signs they have affixed to what seems like every wall and correct them with a sharpie. Her life will not be written over, misrepresented. What is left of her will ensure that.

She will look at the portraits in the gallery, all her ancestors' emotionless faces, flat and dry. Her own portrait is the last, the largest. After all, it is a museum to her. Her murder ( _or her suicide they can't tell which, and stories do not keep well when tongues pass them on)_ , the legend of the vampire imagined to be her, the way the villagers feared her, the dark haired lady, death on a whispering smile. She will stand in front of her portrait and look up at herself, remember when it was painted, the way the dress itched and her legs ached after standing for hours. She will try not to look at the portraits of her mother, her brother, her family all together. She is lost to them all now; she still walks long after they lay still.

She will visit her tomb, read her inscription, the one she commissioned herself. It does not matter what she chose anymore. Those words were not meant for her. They will say on their placards that the rumors of her being a vampire are false, that there are still bones sleeping beneath the implacable stone. She will remember the girl she put there in her place, insurance on her own non-life; she was not the one who paid for it. She will imagine sliding the stone top off, slipping in to lie beside the remains of the girl she stole from life, cradling the girl's skull between her hands, counting finger bones like coins _how much is a girl's life worth in the end._ She will tell herself that it would be for the best. That she could sleep forever, in bloodless darkness, the chatter of the world a wordless hum around her. She will not climb in. The girl deserves to rest in peace. She does not need to be disturbed by her murderer. Even if she should offer it, Carmilla would not want her forgiveness.

She will trace the letters on her mother's grave, her father's, her baby brother's, so young when he died and she will remember how he looked as he closed his eyes. It was a miracle the illness had not hit her, the doctors said. She will smile to herself. Her fate was to live forever in death, or die forever in life. She cannot tell which she is, or both. Or neither. She will feel their eyes on her back as she walks out.

When she steps outside she will leave three hundred years behind her, she will shed her past and reassume her present. She will look at her hands, see all that they have touched flash over her palms like a river of memory. They drip off her wrist and gather in puddles at her feet. She will step over them. Her feet will not touch them. And she will look at the sky, at the cars, at the people in their manufactured clothes with their thumbs tapping across smartphones. She will tell herself that the past is gone. It lives only in her memory and she will not visit that place in her head anymore. She will whisper, as she shuts the door and starts the engine of her car, _welcome to the twenty-first century._


End file.
